In wireless communication networks, a common architecture is to provide a wireless base station device that serves as a gateway for wireless communications with each of multiple wireless client devices, also called client devices or mobile stations. The base station devices in turn need to be connected to a wired network, e.g., the Internet. This infrastructure that connects the base stations to the wired network is referred to as a backhaul network.
The backhaul network, it turns out, is a relatively expensive component in a wireless network deployment. Moreover, deploying the backhaul network may be difficult in certain base station deployments, such as those that involve installing base stations in places such as light poles, building walls, under the eaves of buildings, etc.
To address the difficult in deploying a backhaul network, a so-called “self-backhaul” base station was developed in which a wireless link is provided between the base stations and feeder devices. Thus, a wireless backhaul network is formed that overlays the primary wireless network over which the base station serves client devices. The wireless backhaul network carries all the backhaul traffics between the base stations and the feeders. Thus, the feeders act like base stations in the backhaul network with respect to the base stations in the primary wireless network.
The wireless backhaul network is a fixed point-to-point or point-to-multipoint wireless network with several attributes. The “clients” in the wireless backhaul network are base stations whose position and orientation is optimal for the primary wireless network (e.g., in a micro or pico network) but not necessarily for the wireless backhaul network. The base stations are sometimes positioned at relatively high attitudes with a line-of-sight (LOS) or near-LOS wireless link to the feeders. Consequently, the path loss between the base stations and the feeders nearly follow a free space model, and as a result, the interference among feeders and base stations is very high, which in turn reduces the carrier-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (CINR) to nearly to 0 dB in the wireless backhaul network.